After playing a few more games, I really do find all the token placing and moving a detraction from the game. Get a little bru-haha going and it becomes easy to confuse which activation tokens, stun tokens, and stealth tokens were going to which models.

As well, facing seems more fiddly that is a benefit to gameplay.

They might be drastic changes, but I'd like to hear any ideas people have on how to change both of those issues.

For example, I think if rear influence zones were removed, you could get the back attack bonus if you had a friendly model on the opposite side of the defender as the attacker. Sort of a special double assist bonus.

I've been considering something like a board-side area, with boxes for each player, to put status conditions in instead of on the board. Though, I would likely keep activation and stealth markers on the board directly, because they are going to be among the most needing reference. So, it's easier to keep them immediately available.

Though, I have to say, I don't like the idea of backstriking being a two ninja required thing. That doesn't make sense thematically nor does it mesh with some of it's main uses now. Thematically, you never really imagine a ninja sneaking up behind someone to strike solely because their friend is already pointing a sword at them somewhere else. It's a thing done alone, from the dark. Strategically, it's a similar story. Backstrikes are so the lone kunoichi can run out from the back and take one big swing at the chunin or oni, hoping it pays off or they get donked. That kind of loses all value when you have to run another model out there to take that lone swing.

Attacker always chooses from remaining dice. The dice mechanic is still flawed. With the official rules the odds change in favor of the defender, when the defender gets more dice than the attacker. Consequently it's just plain a bad idea to attack if you have fewer dice than the defender. What you're actually doing is giving him an attack. This change fixes that. Additional defense dice still help limit the attacker's choices but they don't turn the tide and turn the attack into a "Bad idea".

Have you played Blood Bowl? You don't throw a goblin at a troll and expect the troll to win the block - it used the exact same mechanic, the stronger player gets to choose the roll result.

The reason this is a good idea is it encourages a player to think HARD about when to attack and when not to, how maneuver to support an attack, and so on.

It makes perfect thematic sense, when you think about it, that a more skilled ninja would be able to manipulate and outfight a lesser ninja even when the lesser ninja attacks them. Happens all the time in anime and manga - and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

After playing a few more games, I really do find all the token placing and moving a detraction from the game. Get a little bru-haha going and it becomes easy to confuse which activation tokens, stun tokens, and stealth tokens were going to which models.

As well, facing seems more fiddly that is a benefit to gameplay.

They might be drastic changes, but I'd like to hear any ideas people have on how to change both of those issues.

For example, I think if rear influence zones were removed, you could get the back attack bonus if you had a friendly model on the opposite side of the defender as the attacker. Sort of a special double assist bonus.

I've been considering something like a board-side area, with boxes for each player, to put status conditions in instead of on the board. Though, I would likely keep activation and stealth markers on the board directly, because they are going to be among the most needing reference. So, it's easier to keep them immediately available.

Though, I have to say, I don't like the idea of backstriking being a two ninja required thing. That doesn't make sense thematically nor does it mesh with some of it's main uses now. Thematically, you never really imagine a ninja sneaking up behind someone to strike solely because their friend is already pointing a sword at them somewhere else. It's a thing done alone, from the dark. Strategically, it's a similar story. Backstrikes are so the lone kunoichi can run out from the back and take one big swing at the chunin or oni, hoping it pays off or they get donked. That kind of loses all value when you have to run another model out there to take that lone swing.

I've been placing most of my status tokens on the team scroll on the relevant ninja's entry ... Stealth tokens I leave on the board though; I feel like they need to be obvious. Otherwise it does seem like a lot to move around and the board does get cluttered.

Though, I have to say, I don't like the idea of backstriking being a two ninja required thing. That doesn't make sense thematically nor does it mesh with some of it's main uses now. Thematically, you never really imagine a ninja sneaking up behind someone to strike solely because their friend is already pointing a sword at them somewhere else. It's a thing done alone, from the dark. Strategically, it's a similar story. Backstrikes are so the lone kunoichi can run out from the back and take one big swing at the chunin or oni, hoping it pays off or they get donked. That kind of loses all value when you have to run another model out there to take that lone swing.

I hear you, in that there is no longer the trick of stealthing a ninja and then running behind a stronger ninja and getting the +2 Att for Stealth and Rear attack. Personally, I'm ok with that. The stealth bonus was more the ambush move to me anyway. And I like that teamwork is slightly more encouraged really. I would give up that chance of 1 model having a better chance to take out a stronger model on a lone stealth rear attack if it means not fiddling with facing anymore.

Water combat result becomes a problem though. Don't have a good plan for that yet if the rear zone were to disappear.

2-3KB Ninja log: When a ninja is injured (not including by a 3rd stun) they can instead use the ninja log as a decoy and move 3 squares away. One per team.

I've been wanting to do some sort of substitution jutsu thing for the list. This idea is too strong (especially for the low cost) in that it grants mobility and injury negation at, basically any point.

But, it did get my idea factory cranking, and I came up with something good for the lower end of cost that takes this idea and mellows out it's power some. I will go ahead and add it to the front page, thanks! ^_^

So I had a thought about the whole Void is Best Mastery thing because it lets you aim for the result you want/need most often:

What if Mastery let you reroll dice that aren't your affinity OR that are? So if you had Fire Mastery and three Fire comes up you can reroll those hoping for Spirit/Void?

Personally I think their "superiority" is over rated. Void mastery is, marginally, better at causing injury than other mastery. But not by much and here's why. We should start by saying that in all instances other than combat, all mastery skills are equal with the minimal exception of water mastery and spirit mastery being worse for poison checks. So, we are really only talking about combat usefulness. In attacking, void mastery is slightly better than other mastery as you can reroll any die that isn't the (normally) desired result of void. But, the actual superiority of this is slim in that most of the time when you have void results you want to "save" when you reroll, you already don't need to reroll. So, in these cases, whatever mastery you have, it doesn't matter. You already have the results you want. There is the uncommon occurrence that you already rolled void, and they would already be canceled out if you let things lay as they are. This is where void mastery is superior in that you can try for more void results without sacrificing the already rolled ones. The other way it's superior (in attacking) is that if you get no void results on an attack, you are guaranteed to be able to reroll all your dice for the best odds of getting void afterwards. Both of these instances are objectively better for attacking for injury than any other mastery. But, I think the advantage this brings is a far, far cry from the "steamrolling every other team out there and getting twice as much XP as any other team in the league" people attribute to it.

There is also a negative aspect to void mastery, and that comes in on the defensive end which no one seems to bring up. I have seen this situation I'm describing happen more than once. Though it is still defiantly and uncommon occurrence, it happens. When defending with void mastery I have seen the skill lead to attackers being saved from having to injure themselves by the defender canceling all their spirit results and being unable to correct this mistake. This negative aspect isn't a direct counterbalance to the positives. I still agree that it is the best offensive mastery. But the attack advantage with consideration for the defensive disadvantage, leads to it only being slightly better. It's such a slim, statistical, difference that I think any noticable change to it, or to mastery skills in general, would cause much more disparity between mastery skills overall.

After some fairly through testing I have made a few changes to my alternative injury rules and my alternative handicap (ninja shop) rules.

There were two changes and a couple clarifications (involving ronin) to the injury rules. First, the timing of when you gain a mark from an injury changed from the moment a model is injure to the point when it moves from the healing house to the training grounds. This was done both to simplify models with regeneration (or using other healing methods) so they only have to not gain a mark, instead of having to gain then erase it. It also added a level of choice to the team's player. They can let a ninja sit in the healing house, potentially for an entire match, to let them recuperate and avoid possible injury but leave themselves a man down. Or, they could push a wounded ninja who hasn't rested properly back to the field, risking longer term injury. This also helped encourage a deeper roster on teams.

The second change to injury was an added caveat to the void injury result (the permanent removal of a ninja). We found that if this afflicted a chunin that it was almost always a team-destroying event. So, as chunin are stronger than common ninja, we slightly lessened the penalty for a chunin finding themselves with a void injury roll. It's still not pretty for them, but it's not as bad as it was for the team.

The clarifications for ronin just cover having to pay the upkeep fees for injured ronin and what happens when a ronin is permanently removed from a roster.

The other house rule that was updated was the ninja handicap shop.

The most major change was moving the time items and services are purchased from the shop to the "choosing teams" portion of setup, before scenarios are chosen or the board is set up. This was done to make the purchases of a handicap team become more general and "ready for anything". We found that going to the shop after knowing the scenario lead to some exploitative potential. For example in any scenario where a specific target must be injured, a handicapped player would end up purchasing large amount of bonuses that pre-determined combat like decoy logs.

There were also a few cost adjustments based on the popularity of purchasing certain bonuses. Some items went up in cost because they seemed to be purchased disproportionately often. Some things went down for the opposite reason. As a side note to bonus costs, we have found the cost formula for temporary ronin to work exceptionally well with almost all ronin being available when two teams are 3 rating points apart. Two ronin can be purchased temporarily at 2 points and only two or three require a 4 point difference.

I'm new to the game, but I've done some analysis of the combat mechanics. After looking at the charts for injury probabilities, it seems that basic clans have a difficult time getting the desired combat result. I'd like to suggest this variant to add just a little bit of potency to the attacks. As combat stands, there is no way I'd attack a model with a higher DF than my AT without a card to get back to even. The odds of being injured swings way higher than injuring the defender.

Exploding Attack Dice Variant: (For increased probability of favorable attacks)When attacking, any die matching your clan element explodes. This immediately adds a die to the attack (and providing more choices for the offense). If the new matches the element, then it also explodes.

This also allows weaker attackers a chance at a lucky strike against higher defense models (all ninja are supposedly deadly, right?).

I realize that I've not played enough to state that this is a perfect solution, but it does not seem to monkey with any other game elements from what I am aware, and doesn't favor any single affinity. I'd originally thought both attacker and defender should have these explode for their own affinity element, but in the interest of keeping attacks more advantageous, I believe that attacker only is the way to go. I don't think that defensive teams would suffer under this either. But I'm sure long term players can tell me if I'm missing something.

Great thread, and let me know if anyone wants probability charts. I've made a calculator using AnyDice.com, but sadly, some of the higher dice counts (>10d6) will not complete in the maximum 5 second allowable server CPU time, so it errors out. Here is a link, just change the bottom line to what dice you need probability on (ex: "nascombat 4d6 3d6" means 4AT vs 3DF)http://anydice.com/program/837e

My immediate concern with exploding dice is that that would make the void mastery skill far out pace any other attack skill. The two exploitable scenarios I imagine are rolling dice, re rolling non-void dice, then rolling extra from two rolls (ish) worth of void or, slightly different, rolling, rolling the exploding dice, then re-rolling a significantly larger pool after that.

The other large concern is ranged attacks. They are meant to be low risk, low reward attacks (in most cases). But, if an attack 2 yajiri attacking your average (defense 3) target suddenly has no risk in the attack and a 33% chance of being able to choose the results as well, that becomes crazy strong. An attack 3 yajiri against a typically strong (defense 4) target gets around a 50% chance of choosing the results on top of having no possibility of anything happening to them.

There's merit to this idea, somewhere in it. As it's presented, it seems to have some pretty nasty side effects. I, for one, am actually fine with the fact that it's very hard for an attacker to win against a target with a higher defense. Otherwise things like position for assists and planning ahead around that would become more and more meaningless. But, other folk obviously like other methods. If you can tweak the idea around some, I'll be happy to pop it into the front page list, still.

Void Mastery is a beast in itself, I think. I think of models with any of the mastery keywords as being bad asses anyway. Is it possible that if you already have a void rolled, then you probably already have the best result needed anyway. Extra rolls, will not make any difference in that case.

Probability wise, if you already have more dice than your defender, one more die adds around 6% unless you had very low odds to begin, then about 10% to injure. If an average AT of 4, you'd only explode 67% of the time, and it would only be Void 17% of that, for am 11% of injuring. Even 4AT vs 1DF starts at a lowly 45.3% Injure probability before modifiers and powers. An AT4 vs 4DF is 30.3% Injure probability.

For ranged, I'm not sure I'd want to break stealth for an attack that allows the defender to decide the outcome. It's a very low percentage of success, no matter how many die are rolled. But it may reduce the need to get enough bonuses to launch your ranged attack. I'm not a fan of waiting for the right round to attack, though, and I've heard opinions that ranged is not effective at all, but that hasn't been my experience yet. They just take more planning, and unfortunately, a potential wasted activation with no attack.

I believe the risk of launching a ranged attack is that now you are out of stealth, exposed, and the enemy is coming for your weakest defender for the kill.

Another factor is that, I think exploding dice add some fun to a sometimes puzzle like board with lots of pieces to track, and everyone loves a desperate attack paying off. Not that the game lacks fun at all, It's very good. It's just one of those things you can never have too much of

I do think you should play more games. I mean that with all due respect as well. I just see a lot of what your point of view is comes from not having many games and scenarios under your belt. Like thinking losing stealth is something that really matters. Most games end up with 80%+ of the figures out of stealth because giving up a whole turn to get into stealth is rarely the best play. Also, about half the clans have Yajiri with stealthy ranged attacks anyways. The kitsune are especially dangerous with that. Far more so with an exploding dice rule as you suggest. With ranged units, the value of exploding dice isn't what you roll on them, it's that you swing from lower to higher dice. That's what would be a huge deal for ranged.

But, the best way to fiddle with a house rule is to play with it. So, run some games using it. If you have a tolerant opponent, try running the same game (same teams, same scenario, board, etc.) with and without the rule, see if it makes a big difference.

After 3 leagues (one during playtesting), I am not confident in starting a 4th, much larger, league if I can get the support packs somewhere (living in Austria = you dont get official support easily)

This league will have the following balance-update to the rules, as we find that the major imbalances after 3 leagues are best dealt with with a minimalist approach, trying to keep the game as RAW as possible.

Poison: Poison kills now also give XP to the model that last applied a poison marker to the deceased.

Element Masteries: All Element Mastery abilities are just plain rerolls.

Ronin: Goemon does not steal koban, he just produces it. He cannot steal more than your opponent has.

Ronin: The Upkeep cost for a ronin that nobody else in the league has on their roster is halved (round up)

So, why these rules?

First of all Kitsune is too weak, Ijin too strong. This needed a little nudge to get them closer together. Poison being primarily a mechanic Kitsune uses, it needed a bit of help to not handicap their advancement. We didnt find tracking who killed what difficult at all.

The Element Mastery skills were the point of most discussion: They are just horribly lop-sided in their quality, and seemingly randomly applied to the clans. Our first idea was to just allow anyone to take any mastery they wish, but this lead to Void Mastery being taken 95% of the time (another Ijin issue in the RAW), so in order to keep it simple, we just turned them into rerolls. We contemplated turning them into selective rerolls, where you can keep one result of your choice, but this just came back to everyone simulating void (or spirit) masteries.

Goemon has been abused, esp. by Ijin and Tora players, to cement an early lead and utterly ruin other teams early in the league. We dont want to ban him, but we need to remove his "loser loses harder" thing, because he basically became mandatory. This keeps him as useful in helping your own team, while not hurting the already losing team even more.

The Ronin upkeep cost is an incentive to use Ronin that are unique, without actually ruling them unique (we have no really good solution to people hogging unique ronin early in the league, once more giving those with more koban to spend early an advantage to stay ahead). The wildly differring quality of the ronin also led to nobody wanting to afford one. We went back and forth and settled on halved upkeeps for your first ronin, if unique to the league, in order to incentivize taking non-standard ronin.

All in all, there are only 2 areas left where we see a severe need for adjustment down the road:

1. Permanent removal is almost a necessity in longer leagues (I understand the designers didnt like the feeling of losing their super star player to an aging roll or injury, but sometimes monsters are created, and need to be dealt with before they dominate a league), and we consider an "end of league" mechanic before we transfer the teams into a new one, possibly something like voting out the worst player from each team or something.

2. Koban drains late-league are low, and most ronin (see above) not worth taking over properly developed clan ninja that can still use the XP. Since we made ronin a bit cheaper in the start, we assume people will have a bit more money to spend, and are considering buyable re-rolls and other extras, akin to bloodbowls off-pitch advantages. (Healers, wizards, buyable buffs etc.)

Haven't used any ronin as i am still in my first league with my group but poison and elemental mastery sound good. To me the ijin player in my group takes void mastery first chance he gets. The original kitsune player switched teams because he was getting left behind and has found much better luck with ika clan. We also house ruled we draw an extra moon card at the end of each round which feels better than RAW.

Asides from playing the game the competitive way, I'm also looking for a set of added houserules to put together that can speed up and make NAS more accessible for players that can't handle the upkeep. I guess what I'm looking for is a way to make NAS more arcade-y?

For these rules, I would only be doing 1 offs and not a full-on campaigns. If you guys have any suggestions, please share. The idea is to just speed things up without altering the game's balance too much (I realize this will happen). I also don't want to drastically change the game as it might dissuade players who like the competitive rules from joining in.

This is what I have so far:

-Keep models to a maximum of 5 models per player - Lessens management of models on the board that easily gets cluttered.-Each player uses only 1 shrine or 1 lantern. Or not using shrines/lanterns at all. - Lessens more stuff on the board to manage.-Play # of rounds according to challenge described in the rulebook but set a VP amount (agreed on before hand) that auto-wins you the game. - Allows you to adjust the game's length, accordingly.

Added rules just for fun...

-Pick a model on your team to be the designated "all-star". This model will have +2 dice every time it makes an attack/defends on top of stats and other dice boosting effects.-Final round actives all moon cards making them all usable in their advanced forms.

Asides from playing the game the competitive way, I'm also looking for a set of added houserules to put together that can speed up and make NAS more accessible for players that can't handle the upkeep. I guess what I'm looking for is a way to make NAS more arcade-y?

For these rules, I would only be doing 1 offs and not a full-on campaigns. If you guys have any suggestions, please share. The idea is to just speed things up without altering the game's balance too much (I realize this will happen). I also don't want to drastically change the game as it might dissuade players who like the competitive rules from joining in.

This is what I have so far:

-Keep models to a maximum of 5 models per player - Lessens management of models on the board that easily gets cluttered.-Each player uses only 1 shrine or 1 lantern. Or not using shrines/lanterns at all. - Lessens more stuff on the board to manage.-Play # of rounds according to challenge described in the rulebook but set a VP amount (agreed on before hand) that auto-wins you the game. - Allows you to adjust the game's length, accordingly.

Added rules just for fun...

-Pick a model on your team to be the designated "all-star". This model will have +2 dice every time it makes an attack/defends on top of stats and other dice boosting effects.-Final round actives all moon cards making them all usable in their advanced forms.

That's it! Let me know what you guys think.

Good ideas. I d go with one type of shrine per game, so you dont have to keep up with all the different effects. In my experience, the Curse shrine and the Lucky shrines are the best choices, as opposites of each other.

I would look into reducing the choices at the beginning of a round to a default one, usually the "Draw 1 Moon Card" as the standard choice. In my experience, reducing the number of decisions is the best way of being more accessible (though I dont find NAS all that heavy in the first place)

Last but not least, pre-select the abilities of Chunin and Madoushi, so team-building doesnt require advanced knowledge of the game. Its usually easy to take the "better" option over the "situational" one.